


A Life in Pink and Blue

by Sand_Cursive



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Character Study, Gen, but so fun to write, probably not super accurate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-07
Updated: 2017-09-07
Packaged: 2018-12-24 19:32:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12019509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sand_Cursive/pseuds/Sand_Cursive
Summary: So long in stasis had done a number on her faculties, on the only ones that mattered, and for a few brief, blissful moments she had forgotten that there was a war. That her people were being decimated, that the horrors of the galaxy had descended upon her home, that she had great cause to be afraid.An Allura Character Study





	A Life in Pink and Blue

There are some dark hours in the morning, as she steps softly down darkened hallways, when she knows that not even the mice are awake. It’s almost peaceful, reminiscent of adolescent misbehaviour when she would sneak out of bed and wander the nearly empty halls, dodging staff and giggling quietly to herself as she played in the shadows. She no longer fits in those tiny alcoves she passes.

The stillness is so deep, so quiet, that the longer she walks the harder it becomes to pretend. These are not the soft walls of her childhood, the threat of being discovered no longer real. She remembers, just around the corner, when she was caught by her nanny. She imagines it from the new vantage point that her height affords her — a distant observer.

Sometimes she doesn’t remember who that little girl is anymore.  
  
This is the time when the training room is often safely empty. Even Keith and Shiro, restless as they are, seldom venture in now excepting stresses she doesn’t quite understand. _It’s strange_ , she thinks, shedding the long shift of her outer dress in favour of the less dignified (but eminently more practical) training gear that she always preferred when she was young. (Or maybe she wasn’t young, but it is just so, so long ago . . . ) _I always felt like we understood each other best_.

Among the paladins, at least, Keith and Shiro have always had the same shade of sadness to their smiles, the same scent of loss trailing in their wake. She doesn’t know, exactly, what it is that they’ve lost. She won’t ask.

She grabs a simple training staff out of the storage unit hidden in the walls, and lets the weight settle in her hands, twirling it once, twice, experimentally. Testing the balance. It’s a useless ritual; these staffs are the same as they’ve always been. Even if she didn’t remember, her body does. It spins smoothly around her wrist and she catches it without looking.

When she’d first fallen from that pod, crumpling gracefully ( _A princess is elegance and grace_ , they always told her. _No matter the situation_. And she hates that she remembers this, that her body defaults so easily to so useless a position. Grace and elegance and light steps are not things that will win a war), into the arms of the new blue paladin it had taken her an age and a half to remember. So long in stasis had done a number on her faculties, on the only ones that mattered, and for a few brief, blissful moments she had forgotten that there was a war. That her people were being decimated, that the horrors of the galaxy had descended upon her home, that she had great cause to be afraid. She takes a quick, brutal swing with the staff.

That her father is dead.

“Begin training simulation Tevan, level 92.”

For the first 20 nights she had awoken, shocked from sleep with tears on her cheeks, damp pooling on her pillow. She’d actually cried herself awake. Now on most night she comes here instead, slowly working her way through the simulations, old and new. She’s so tired of crying.

When she had first stepped in, she had remembered it as only a little while ago, a month at the most since she had last been inside a simulation. But the years ( _ten thousand years_ ) had managed to wear away muscle memory even in a vessel kept in such perfect condition. She’d stumbled an unforgivable twice before she shut it down, chest heaving and heart beating out of her chest. She had never felt so weak.

She had allowed herself a scant minute to regain her footing, and then she had started all the way from the beginning. This was no longer the time for giving up, for feeling down. She was so tired of crying.

Now she parries blow after blow, ducking and whirling and jumping with a grace that would make Keith weep. It is a different sort of elegance than seen in carriage; she is brutal and violent and swift and it is terrifying to watch. A sort of dance that would have shocked the royal assembly.

She is born to violence not bred for it.

When she had been a child she had marveled at her father and his advisers, at the team he led so willingly into the vast stretches of space. His diplomacy, his calm careful strategies, the way his people loved him. She would clutch eagerly at the trailing edges of his cape as he walked, tripping over short legs to keep up. She noticed, later, when she was older, that he always shortened his stride to match hers.

He gave speeches in the throne room, stature grand and tall and large without the slightest effort at altering his size. His subjects would listen enraptured; their protector, their greatest leader and fighter and strategist, the words pouring from his mouth sonorous in syllable. He could lift a hand and they would follow.

He brokered peace with great diplomacy, managed his kingdom and treaties and tenuous alliances. He went out to the great dark full of stars and returned with friends, with new medicines and science and something she would call magic, so unknowable and strange. He went out and brought back paladins.

This was her father, the great King Alfor, lover of worlds and broker of peace. He trusted these strangers, and the people trusted him. These individuals, aliens in uniform, were a great force for good and justice in the galaxy. They began as security; peace keepers in the wild and lawless voids that slept between the alliance planets. Her father made the lions and then they became more. They became paladins.

They loved her father, too. She saw it, in the rare, raw ways it showed on their faces when she managed to sneak into clandestine strategy meetings, reports, training. The first time her mother had seen her, walking out of the viewing deck of the training room, she had folded her hands sternly at her waist and frowned. Fighting was not for the princess of a diplomatic people.

None of the lectures that followed these excursions curbed her enthusiasm any. She stole every moment she could, precious and fleeting, to catch glimpses into the excitement of her father’s world. Into the role that she wanted to inherit.

The first time she set foot on the training room floors, she had barely reached her father’s shoulders, long spindly limbs still held formally, stiffly, gracefully at her sides. She had pretended ceremony until she was certain that no one was there, no one watching. Then she had picked up a staff and the first training lesson. She returned every night after that.

She was not so graceful, with no one there to guide her. She hadn’t the patience for any tutorials past the fundamental basics, and she was prone to fits of impulsiveness in her movement. Both parents found out, for the first time, by virtue of a long gash along the top of her knee that she had managed in a particularly reckless bout of training from the night before. The blood caught on the gold trim at her skirts without her notice, and her mother had pursed her lips. Her father had laughed, grabbing her in his arms and twirling her in a half stanza of her favourite Altean song. Her mother had looked on disapprovingly, and in the morning all Allura’s skirts had been extended a palm’s length. To start.

There had been nothing she had loved more than those training sessions until one day her father invited her into his, offering private tutoring and some sparring partners. Her blood sang with the adrenaline, with the warmth of his proud gaze as she spun and kicked and punched. Her grace and her elegance had not yet been warped by necessity, by danger and anger and hate. He watched and smiled and told her it looked like she was dancing.

She had watched her father and his paladins going off into the sky, ready and willing to help and defend. She stood at the tallest point of the castle and it was her widow’s peak. She would watch diligently until the last coloured speck had floated away and never dreamed that they wouldn’t be coming back. She sat quietly in on their training sessions, and on very very good days sometimes they let her participate. She sweat and smiled and laughed and never felt more safe.

One day she wandered up to a widow’s peak and watched them depart, all five bright specks in the distance. And on a bright, cloudless night they returned. She hadn’t been there to watch, hadn’t taken her post with some vague premonition stirring in her gut. She had been fast asleep, curled under her blankets and helplessly dreaming. She only woke to the sound of harried steps outside her bedroom door, to the secret security channel she had routed to feed directly onto her room’s private screens. The images flickered blearily, but she could see her father pacing, anxious in the strategy room, three paladins huddled around him. She didn’t even grab her slippers before she was running down the hall, skidding around corners and bursting into the room.

The black paladin was not there.

They explained it to her later, over hours and days and weeks, through whispered snippets and eavesdropped conversations and particularly manipulative lines of questioning. The black paladin had been dead, but not. And he would not be coming back. Not in this capacity.

When she was still that young (so young, _too young_ ) she thought she had wished for this. She had watched the sparring, heard of the adventures, saw their brilliant strategies and meetings and minds. It was a war but she hadn’t known to call it that, not yet. She saw each new escapade as daring and exciting and wonderful without realizing that the stories she heard had been hand-fed and carefully censored. They had only ever offered the good news.

And her father had always turned to her, eyes and smile bright. She had not seen the weight of this responsibility, of these battles and these lives weighing heavily on his shoulder, curving his spine and twisting his heart. She would not see it for years, when she began to know the true tolls of death this war had brought. (And she would know, then, to call it a war). She had too much blind faith of the kind children often have in their parents, so sure that they could move mountains and conquer the world. She never saw the end coming.

Even then, she hadn’t given up.

“We need to fight!” she’d shouted, and her father had sighed and looked at her and suddenly she saw a million planets, a million worlds, dying slowly in that light. She’d taken a step back, shocked, panicked, and her father had stepped enough out of his profound fear and kept her safe the best way he knew how.

She thinks of his face, now, the heartbreak and conviction in his eyes. She jumps and parries and ducks, swiping out with one long leg. She goes for damage now, and not grace, not elegance, not the light, easy, dancing steps her father had once praised. The robot is so badly damaged, wires sparking, that she takes a step back and finds her breath. A crumpled mass of steel and smoke and she is nowhere close to done.

She has learned not to dwell too long on these violent victories. There is no space in war for regret.

“Beginning level 93.”

She takes her stance, and waits, chest heaving, staff extended. She is learning to be patient.

* * *

  
She had been privately, quietly furious those first few nights, fresh from stasis, tempered by a desperate and shameful gratefulness. Her father’s most trusted advisor and friend had abandoned him to be there for her, and right when he had been most needed. She smiled and cried with him and tried to hold herself together. She couldn’t look him directly in the eye those first few weeks, a hot, crawling feeling of disgust moving up her neck. She was ashamed of him and humiliated by her own weakness, so eager to forgive his own if only for the fact that she was not now alone.

She would never really know what it had taken for Coran to follow her. Had her father threatened him? Had he been bowed by a request from his king? Or maybe he had gone willingly instead, heart full with affection for father and daughter both, desperate to see at least one come out the other side.

Her father died. He had died, was dead is dead. Her regret cannot bring him back, and her misplaced disappointment offers much the same compensation. She still feels it twist, jabbing slow and thin and needle-like into a very soft space in her heart. Most days she can bury this feeling, hide it under righteous anger and a moral obligation. She knows who is at fault, at the very core of it all. Some days, she can even forget she felt like that at all.

She is still grateful. Her father is dead but Coran is _here_ and he knows, he knows, he _knows_. It is more than the years of training and experience, the understanding of vast histories and cultures and biologies and engineering. He knows where to look for resources, he knows how to fix key castle systems, he understands the way each and every culture in their old and shattered alliance had worked. It is so, so easy to see how he had risen so far, so fast into her father’s favour.

He is the most brilliant man she knows, and so much more. He _understands_.

She stands at the edge of the universe, the whole of space spread out behind her, the castle trailing years of history and loss like so much exhaust that it chokes the air and she can’t see past it. She stands at the helm of her ship with the stars spread out before her in a map that’s become so much harder to read. Ten thousand years. The stars and the plants have shifted, gravity doing its work and it doesn’t even matter because she’s so far outside any systems that she recognizes. She is unmoored, adrift, and Coran is an anchor that’s unmoored with her, both of them floating around in a tiny vessel and pretending it a home.

* * *

 

They find the distress beacon, flashing out somewhere in a quadrant with low traffic. It’s small enough and innocuous enough and safe enough to be a trap. She takes them anyway.

“We are here to help,” she says, and means it.

Here are two rebels who are fighting the good fight, who are here and outnumbered and willing to make a stand. It isn’t much and she knows it and they know it too. But it counts. It matters. And honestly, she is just so relieved to know that Zarkon has not run his entire reign unopposed. That people see the evil and the suffering and that they care. They have not had Voltron but they have had each other and doesn’t that count for something?

The paladins stand together with these strangers who are not so strange, so ready to talk and laugh and help and listen. She turns her eyes up to the stars and thinks maybe someday they will find it: some vast expansive network, some secret base, where they will be able to contribute to a war effort that has been going on for centuries, that already has plans and intel and leaders who are older and more experienced and more ready to take this burden on their shoulders.

Later, when the blue lion has disappeared and Lance is trussed up on a beautiful stretch of isolation she will square her shoulders and tighten her grip. These lions, these paladins are her responsibility and she will feel guilt worm its way up from her stomach and catch in her throat at the merest suggestion that she had even thought to hand them off to someone else. How can she ask them to do this if she does not do it with them? This is a war, and war makes adults of us all. Her youth is far behind her now, (years and years and _ten thousand years_ ) and she will straighten her spine and coordinate and wonder whether a resistance really does exist at all.

Later, when the blue lion is returned and Hunk sits smug in his seat and says _I told you so_ , she will not apologize. She was wrong and trusting and she does not regret it.

Everyone deserves the chance to be saved.

* * *

 

They arrive on the Balmera and it is a scarred and beautiful beast and to see this devastation so wholly after so much time ( _and no time at all_ ) is heartbreaking. But there are people here and they need her help and they can still be saved. She pilots the ship and shouts instruction and as the situation grows desperate she readies herself to drop down and carry everyone out on her back.

“I won’t give up on any of you,” she says and she won’t, not again, not like she has for ten thousand years, carelessly abandoning the universe to face the wrath of her father’s former friend. He stands, still, tall and alive after ten thousand years when her father was cut down mere minutes from the beginning of her stasis. How much destruction has gone unchecked, how much violence has been allowed? The Galra have carved a swatch through the stars with no consequence while she has been asleep. She leads Shay and her family skywards, and then the ground breaks.

She feels bile churn, ugly in her gut, as she looks out over all these innocent lives that she doesn’t know how to save. She’s desperate, and she will not allow another genocide. All these people, all these _families_. She kneels and refuses to give up and her voice doesn’t shake because it’s been trained out of her but she is cowed by this responsibility, by this need to keep more deaths at bay. No one will be left behind.

 _It’s too dangerous_ , Coran says, and she knows that, she can guess the risk even if she doesn’t know the full scope of it, but she looks him in the face and tells him she will take it. The ground glows beneath her and the Balmerans surround her and she lets the full force of her energy leach out of her and into the ground. They say it isn’t right for her and her paladins to risk their lives for them, but that was never in question. She will save everyone she can, she will give her life for a single world, a single people.

She will not pick and choose who dies.

* * *

   
They meet in his memories. She’d been so shocked to find him, just there and waiting. A parting gift from a loving father to a daughter who is deep in grief and unable to see past it, yet. She goes nearly every night, nightgown freshly pressed, her hair and makeup and manner perfect for an audience with the King. Her father always smiles, every time, and tells her how beautiful she looks, how wonderfully she’s grown. But she hasn’t. She is barely weeks older than the last time he had seen her. But the lines in his face are fewer and shallower and she pretends not to notice the way his gaze automatically falls just shy of her eyes before he can correct himself.

A memory remembering a memory.

He is exactly what she needs, who she needs him to be. A strong leader, a loving father, supportive of her choices in this unyielding battle. She cannot stay away, cannot stop coming to him, night after night, desperate for some connection to the man that he was. The hologram fills her heart as only a hologram can — there until the moment she steps out of projected range. She goes to bed each night both comforted and more lonely than she was before. And yet. This is all she has left, so she clings desperately with both hands and refuses to let go, refuses to see what she keeps such tight hold of in her palms.

In her drained state she goes to see him, lets him comfort her and feels as though she still has him, really has him, to love and coddle her as he once did when she was a child. They speak like adults now, more equals than she’d ever felt before and yet still so inferior to a mirage of light and memory. She won’t close her eyes because this illusion is all she has, is all she needs. Coran comes to drag her away and she knows she is living on air but it fills her lungs so fresh and clean she doesn’t care. She isn’t ready to leave.

It is the slap of realization in the face of a dying star that makes her startle back into herself. This program is no longer the man she wants it to be. She knows without doubt that her father loved her more than anything, would never risk her life after trapping her into keeping it, would never put Voltron’s paladins in danger. Not so senselessly and cruelly as this. Even at his most defeatist, even at the end, he was never _this_. Her father is _dead_ and she can feel her blood turn to ash but she stands strong and firm and knows what needs to be done. Her goodbye is the quiet cry for something that she lost long ago. But she is her father’s daughter.

She turns back to the bowels of the ship, wades through priceless memories long past and feels the weight of them course down her cheeks in shining tears. He was alive and he was hers and he loved her. And this final, cruel trick, this beautiful epilogue appears in front of her and she throws herself into an embrace that he can no longer return. She feels the containment glass shatter beneath her strong arms and the flicker of light ascends towards the darkness overhead and she pretends it is his ghost winking his goodbye.

  
( It isn’t until later, lying in bed and sobbing over this loss that she realizes that she had never once dressed up for her father in his life. But he was the only one who’d been saved, uploaded, the only one who she could talk to and pretend not to be saying a eulogy. She thinks about the way his smile made his eyes look kind, the way he remembered all her favourite things, the way he still knew exactly what to say. She thinks about how desperately she’d wanted to fly into that star and see him, made real again, and wonders how much of it is true). 

* * *

 

It is such a small thing, this base, so easy to miss and so entirely unimpressive that she’d never think to go there on her own. Enemy intel is such a valuable thing. She can feel her muscles relax, can feel the surge of the Altean equivalent of adrenaline rushing through her veins. There is finally _something_ , something tangible that she can focus her efforts on and she has an abundance of energy that she needs to release.

She tells them that she’s going, and she’s met with incredulity. _They always underestimate the princess._ The shock on their faces is worth it when Shiro tells her to suit up, the final word even if she’s the one in charge of the entire operation. They defer to her — call her princess as though she’s still royalty, as though they’re her subjects on this mass of floating metal — but they respect him. The difference is distinct, and she pretends most days she does not feel the bristle of it raw against her bones. They were strangers first, and she has proven herself and will continue to do so.

She wants to be a leader by qualification, not design, not fear, not obligation. She is willing to work for it. She doesn’t know yet that it’s already been earned.

The look of surprise on their faces never gets old. They have the expressive range that Coran has grown into, and she likes seeing the way their muscles shift and twitch, the way they colour reflexively the way Alteans can choose to. She throws herself tall and purple and they gape and pepper her with questions and amazement and she lets herself be amused. She was young, once. _(Is she young, anymore?)_

She sneaks Shiro on board the ship and plays stoic Galra soldier. She postures and ad-libs and thinks quickly when things go south. She breaks down metal doors and flings full Galra men like they were playthings and she remembers, in a brief instant of perfect clarity when Zarkon himself had held her by the hands and spun her in circles until she got so dizzy she’d laughed and begged him to stop. Her steps don’t stutter but her breathing does, just for a second. And then they’re running.

They’re surrounded and she shoots and she realizes she doesn’t know what she’s doing. The guns are all new and wrong and Shiro is no longer as impressed-looking anymore and they still have so far to run. She feels trapped, suddenly, hyper aware of how small these hallways are, these corridors, and _there_! The escape pod is in the hangar, and they’re so close . . .

She slams the button for the door but they’re inching in, so many of them, and the chance to slip away is getting smaller and smaller. She has her fingers digging deep into metal and she’s straining to pull the door closed and the ship is getting ready to eject . . . There’s a sudden glow of heat from below her and Shiro is trying to heat the door, seal it up and save them both and she suddenly realizes that he does not understand. She’s always said that this mission is bigger than any one person and she thought he’d agreed but he does. not. understand. This is not the time for foolish loyalty.

Her thoughts are calm. She takes a deep breath. The Galra will not be gentle if they ever take their champion back and they both know it. Her team is so ready to sacrifice themselves for her without ever considering the full truth of the situation. They don’t expect her to reciprocate.

She has no delusions about her consequence. The universe needs Voltron, and Voltron needs the black lion. Coran can pilot the castle. She has lamented for weeks about being the last of her family, but she is not the last of her kind. The fight can go on without her.

She flings him through the escape pod’s doors in a perfect arc. The crunching of metal behind her is grating as the sentries tear it open but she doesn’t look back. She can feel the cool heat of them reaching, grabbing, can see the desperation in Shiro’s face as the pod closes and departs. She breathes out. And smiles.

  
They march her to their emperor, and this is an honour she was not expecting. She tenses in anticipation, hate crawling under her skin so hot she thinks she’s going to burn. The shape of him, the size of him, it is still so familiar and she can remember the way he had looked at her father’s table, laughing, the surprise on his face when she had run full tilt into his legs at eight years old, the way he had sat beside her on her birthday and offered a ceremonial gift that she had loved without understanding, the way he had smiled at her parents, the way —

He turns and the hate boils white-hot and she shudders like a collapsing star, running, yelling, so angry she is blind. His witch steps in front of him and forces her back and she sprawls on the floor and lets her venom explode. She stares him in eyes she doesn’t recognize and remembers her father’s despair when he had thought his friend dead, and wishes that his folly really had killed him all those years ago. It would have been worth her father’s anguish, his friends’ pain, his people’s suffering and sadness if only he had not awoken under his burial shroud. 


End file.
